The word "socialism" is so loosely used and abused. Socialism means plenty for all, abundance for all. Such a declaration goes very much against the austerity promoters of the environmental movement. are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places. Our desire is to end poverty, to increase production that will supply all with the the necessities for a decent life.
Workers don’t need a crystal ball to see their future. The capitalists and their state, in their never-ending need for higher profits, are willing to make the lives of the majority of working people a misery. In contrast, the working class, if it were united, could transform this planet into a storehouse of plenty for all. But the roots of capitalism and private enterprise are deep and strong. The problem is that too many people accept capitalism and its economic laws and therefore see no alternative and defend that system at all costs. Capitalism offers no hope of ending this reign of poverty. It is an astonishing paradox that, in a world where science and technology have advanced to the stage where there could be plenty for all, there is a growing amount of scarcity and shortages.
Working men and women need a new perspective today as never before. They need the knowledge of their own strength to empower them to construct a better world – a world free from hunger, unemployment, war and destruction. It is by the independent political action of working people, those who produce the wealth of society, that plutocratic power and privilege can be eliminated and a world of peace, prosperity and plenty for all will be built. There can be plenty for all – but only by socialising the means of production and placing production under control of society as a whole. There is a new and fuller life to be made.
Our most cherished hope for the future is one of the class-free socialist society. For our part we seek to abolish the chains of exploitation and establish the true free society of socialism. However, the apologists of the capitalist system wish to assure everyone that it can actually bring abundance but at every turn they hide the fact that capitalist ownership regulates production for capitalist profit and that the system does not run as production ought to run, to produce for society. Instead they have been painting a rosy picture of capitalism run according to a plan, with a board of government experts ensuring that everything will run smoothly. Yet they refuse to acknowledge the disparity between the steady abundance the workers could produce, and the pittance that they receive. Under capitalist ownership, the capitalists make profits by keeping as much as they can, and paying out as little in wages as they must. They pay the workers the smallest wage they can bargain them down to. On the average, that amounts to a wage which is just enough to get along on, the smallest amount a worker can afford to work for. Even, for a large part of the workers, it amounts to not enough support a family and to raise healthy children. And this is the case even in the most prosperous capitalist country. It is the very system of capitalist ownership and wage labour which sets this ceiling on the standard of living. This same system prevents production of abundance. It is one of the outstanding absurdities of capitalism that millions of workers must be arbitrarily sentenced to suffer unemployment in order to regulate wage levels for the economic system. Every worker must know that there is a person out of a job that the boss can hire if an employee demands higher wages. This ever-existent unemployed group under capitalism Marx named the industrial reserve army.
The special strength of the workers is that they are workers – their strength is in the factories and wherever else they work. Through their own workers’ councils the people who work by hand and by brain, can freely participate in the construction of a new society, can socialise production under the control of workers’ committees, can organise the whole of production for the use of the majority. In the struggle between labour and capital, this is the outcome that we hope for and work for.
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